Associated Press
RICHLAND — The Hanford Reach National Monument will start looking more visitor-friendly in the coming year, although a significant portion of the site still will be off-limits to the public.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the monument, plans to put up wood-and-rock signs at major entrances to the 200,000-acre site. They will depict a fall chinook salmon jumping out of the Columbia River. A 51-mile stretch of the river, alongside Hanford nuclear reservation, is a primary spawning ground for the fish.
"We are going to do it right," said Greg Hughes, the monument manager. "This is just a taste of what is to come."
The Fish and Wildlife Service also plans to add seven new employees to its Richland staff, including technical specialists and a planner for the monument. And one day, there will probably be two visitor centers to tell people about the region’s natural and political history.
Right now, "as you drive up the highways, you don’t even recognize it is a national monument," Hughes said as he discussed plans at a meeting of the monument’s citizen advisory board on Wednesday.
The monument was created by the Clinton administration in 2000.
The Hanford Reach portion of the river is relatively pristine, as is much of the shrub-steppe landscape, because a lot of the monument area has served as a buffer zone for the Hanford nuclear reservation. In additional to providing salmon spawning habitat, the monument is home to several rare species of plants and animals.
The reservation was established during World War II to make plutonium for the atomic bomb. Today, it is the most contaminated nuclear site in the nation.
The Richland City Council this week offered the Fish and Wildlife Service a spot at Columbia Point for a monument visitor center. The city of Kennewick also has expressed interest in a visitor center, while others have suggested putting a center at the northern end of the monument site, near Mattawa.
"To me, the issue of how many interpretive centers there are going to be should be resolved before we start looking for locations," said Jim Watts, chairman of the advisory committee.
The committee is charged with developing a plan for the monument, discussing such issues as public use and resource protection.
"We need balanced groups … so we don’t just gravitate into (camps advocating) ultraprotection and ultrause," said Rich Steele, a committee member who represents outdoor recreation interests.
Wednesday’s committee meeting was the first since October. The meetings were suspended because the Fish and Wildlife Service’s Richland office ran out of money for them.
In December, the agency announced that the monument would get the largest operating budget increase in the history of the National Wildlife Refuge system, including $100,000 for the advisory committee.
Hughes also hopes to get $50,000 from the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, which aims to help resolve natural resource issues. The money would be targeted for one of the stickiest questions facing monument planners: What should be done to prevent the erosion of the landmark White Bluffs along the river? Nearby irrigation is blamed for destabilizing the bluffs.
"It’s huge, and everybody knows it’s huge," Hughes said.
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